Togo - West Africa - page 901

We're backstage at the eighth annual Festival on the Niger. It's February 2011, the month before a military
coup in Mali's capital, Bamako, will overthrow the elected government of president Amadou Toumani Touré. Be-
fore the decades-long rebellion by ethnic Tuareg rebels in the north of the country will be hijacked by radical
Islamists with links to al-Qaeda.
It's hard to imagine that within months hotels and bars will close, livelihoods will be taken away, and the ap-
plication of a strict form of sharia law in northern Mali will almost silence the music.
However, down in Segou - a three-hour drive from Bamako - about 35,000 West Africans and Western tourists
throng the dusty streets and banks of the Niger across the festival's four days. Most have come to see Keita.
'Of all Mali's many musicians, Salif is the most admired by Malians', says Mamou Daffe, director of Festival
on the Niger. 'Not only is he proof that anyone can succeed in life, he was the first artist to bring the music of
Mali to international acclaim.'
When world music became a popular genre in the West in the late 1980s, Keita was at its vanguard. He moved
to Paris, worked with Carlos Santana and jazz musicians Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul. In 1987 he released
Soro , a hi-tech hybrid he calls his visiting card. In the late 90s he began spending increasing amounts of time in
Mali, and in 2001 went back for good.
'For me to go forward I needed to remember where I came from', says Keita, who owns a recording studio in
Bamako and whose 2013 album Talé is fuelled by optimism.
Where he comes from is now a country in crisis: 'I am Muslim, but I am against - 1000 times against - funda-
mentalism', a prescient Keita told Freemuse.org in 2002.
'Let's fight to build our happiness', he says now.
Cape Verdean Music
Cape Verdean music came late to the West. The undisputed star of the bluesy, melancholy
songs (known as morna ) was the 'barefoot diva' Cesária Evora, a barefoot, ciggie-puffing
grandmother who passed away in December 2011. European influences are obvious in
morna, the equivalent of Portugal's fado, while Africa is at the fore in other genres such
as the dance-oriented coladeira, accordion-led funana and percussive women's music,
batuco . Look out for the 2013 international debut album by 60-year-old morna balladeer
Zé Luis, the Lisbon-based Lura and T cheka , a singer-songwriter and guitarist who plays
beats that are normally played on percussion.
Akwaaba Music ( www.akwaabamusic.com ) is a Ghana- generated site dedicated to African music and
pop culture: to finding new sounds and trends, sharing them, selling them, putting them out there.
Gumbe
Closely associated with Guinea-Bissau, gumbe is an uptempo, polyrhythmic genre that
fuses about 10 of the country's folk-music traditions. Lyrics, sung in Portuguese creole,
are topical and witty; instruments include guitars and the water drum, an upturned cala-
bash floating in a bucket. Gumbe is sometimes used as an umbrella term for any folk mu-
sic in Guinea-Bissau but should not be confused with kizomba , the popular dance and